“Genes are the things that are, for the most part, driving differences among children, and not different teachers or even different schools,” Byrne told Insight’s Jenny Brockie, during filming of the show’s feature on twins.

"Genes are the things that are driving differences among children ... not teachers and schools."

Byrne says his findings “undermine the idea that a really, really big player in how well children are doing is teacher qualifications and a teacher's education.”

He stresses that the research does not show teachers’ influence is negligible; rather, it shows they are uniformly well-trained and high-performing, keeping students’ academic performance at national standards regardless of which teacher children are given or which school they go to.

“Teachers really matter,” he reiterates.

“The reason why a child knows more at the end of a school day than they did at the beginning is because of the work the teachers do.”

“I think it's good news for teachers that within this country the quality of training is similar enough and good enough to produce rather even-handed effects on the children who are your charges.”

Byrne says the findings are important “for the education system to understand that genes matter”, but cautions against being pessimistic about genetic predisposition.

Emeritus Professor Brian Byrne

Chris Watt, Federal Secretary of the Independent Teachers Union, says this kind of research confirms what teachers have known for a long time: that some children are born with advantages, when others are not, and there needs to be greater resources that allow them to factor those differences into their teaching.

"At the end of the day, a school can only do so much," he says.

"There's a whole of lot things that need to be right for kids to be learning properly. We have to pay attention to those issues before they step foot inside a school."

He's confident educators will be able to adapt their practice to these sorts of results, however.

"Teachers are always changing the way they go about teaching, picking up new skills and strategies," he says.

Byrne agrees.

"My guess is experienced teachers have developed good ways to adjust the curriculum for students who start out weaker in a subject."

"But my guess, too, is that most feel that if they had more time and back-up they could accomplish this even more convincingly."

The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and the Australian Education Union (AEU) were also contacted for comment.

Twins: 'Nature's perfect experiment'

Byrne says the involvement of twins in his research has been incredibly important.

“They are the perfect natural experiment. We use their data to extrapolate across the wider population.”

Because twins almost always share the same environment going up, and a large portion of their genes, comparing their differences and similarities can tell us much about whether certain behaviours and abilities are the product of nature or nurture.

For example, he found that twins – whether identical or fraternal - performed equally as similar to one another even when they were in different classes and schools.

Insight guest and school principal Jennifer Lawrence – herself a twin – said she found this to be the case when looking at her twin daughters’ academic results.

“When Abbie and Emily were in Year 3 they were separated for the first time,” she says.

“I had this terrible feeling that I would be disadvantaging one over the other because maybe one would get a better teacher than the other, but their NAPLAN results were almost identical in that year.”

Jennifer Lawrence with her twin, Julie, and twin daughters Abbie and Emily.